I HEARD Vlad say it. I heard his words, “Now, 49th. Now you die.”
But I didn’t take those words the way Vlad intended. How could he kill one who’d already surrendered her life? He couldn’t. Hadn’t the Fourth Seal shown me that?
Surrender. Turn the cheek. Forgive. Let go. Love.
Find love by letting go of everything but love. Find love by dying to self, the small self, the earthen-vessel self so desperate to be a god of its own making, seeking honor, seeking vindication, seeking correction, seeking to know itself through the polarity of law.
My knowing of the first four seals crashed in on me with those three words: Now you die.
The auditorium filled with cries of alarm as Vlad ripped a dagger from his jacket. It was shaped like a cross with a jagged blade. That’s what they saw and I saw it as well, but then my perspective shifted.
The world was moving slowly, like a movie running at a tenth of its intended speed. Vlad was streaking for me, lips twisted, dagger drawn back, intent on shoving the blade deep into my heart. But I saw him moving slowly through air as heavy as water.
The crowd’s panicked cries sounded far away, as if from another world. Or maybe I was in another world, just watching this one, oddly disconnected.
Fear fell away like a thick cloud of tiny metal filings falling off an electric magnet that had been unplugged. Shut off the negative charge and the darkness falls. Judgment was the negative charge, because judgment was only a form of fear.
This is what it means to cast darkness away, I thought. This is how you resist evil. You abide in love because love has no negative charge. No polarity.
There is no fear in love. There is no darkness in light. Simple.
So I unplugged. I died to my small judging self once more. I let go of all my attachments to this life just like I had in the storm in Other Earth.
All of this before Vlad had completed his first stride and my awakening was only beginning.
What Vlad had intended for evil in all that he’d done—right down to saying, “Now you die”—the light was using for good. All things worked together for good in love, even what I perceived as darkness. Like the devil in the story of Job, even Vlad was only playing his role as shadow with the consent of divinity.
Did he know that?
Now he was two steps in, rushing at me, hatred spilling from his eyes. He was screaming something, but he sounded like a mouse squeaking as it poked its head out of a hole in the wall. That’s all Vlad was to me in that sudden shift in perspective.
Vlad was like a mouse. The shadow of a mouse.
The room had erupted in a cacophony of confusion and panic, but I was above it all, thinking these thoughts that seemed so simple and clear to me.
What is shown to be in the one who sees? Tell me. Close your eyes and sing my song with me.
I let my eyelids fall, and as soon as I did, I heard the note. A single note, sung high and pure in a lake of light far, far away. But that note was also singing in me, because in this world the lake was inside of me. It was inside all of us.
In one brilliant flash, I saw what was happening to me in Other Earth. Felt myself rushing through the lake, from the light to the green to the black through the red and into the light once more.
And in that last light, the note again, sung high and pure. The song of love that was me.
The Fifth Seal blossomed behind my closed eyes, and I saw myself place my hand on the ball of light. Heard myself say the words. “White: True Love is the Evidence of Being in the Light.”
And with those words I felt the raw power of love rush up my arm and brand my shoulder with a searing heat.
I didn’t know and I didn’t care what Vlad was doing now, because I was lost in a sea of love in which there were no problems. Love never had nor ever could have a problem.
My body, suspended, trembled in the Leedhan’s grasp. But it was the infinite energy of love that shook me now, not Vlad’s fear. I was caught up in the rapture of that one pure note called love.
Warm tears were streaming down my cheeks. I could feel them running off my chin.
Sing it with me, dear daughter. Sing our beautiful song for the whole world to hear.
I parted my lips and let the note from the lake inside of me sing. It was hardly more than a whisper, thin and broken through this small earthen vessel’s vocal cords, but it was pure and true.
The moment that note left my mouth, something in the room changed. My eyes were closed so I didn’t see it, but I could feel the seismic shift that altered the state of consciousness in the hall.
Still I sang that note, broken but pure, no longer aware of time. I didn’t dare stop any more than I would dare stop being me. The song was love, you see.
I was love.
Open your eyes and sing our song, my beloved. Let the whole world see how beautiful they are. You are such a beautiful daughter to me. Sing, dear one. Sing!
I held the note beyond the need for breath, overwhelmed by its power, and I slowly let my eyes open.
The whole scene had changed. I was on my feet now, facing the people, and the Leedhan that had held me in its grasp was gone. The power of that single note streamed from me, flooding the auditorium, rushing over the gathering. If they couldn’t see it, they could feel the power, because it was like a wind, lifting their hair.
To a man, woman, and those few children who were present, tears streamed down their faces. Some were wailing, doubled over. Others lay on the floor, sobbing. The president was doubled over, trembling.
It was only a single note barely sung by a seventeen-year-old girl who’d been born blind, but it was shaking the world.
My voice fell silent. Vlad stood less than ten feet to my right. His eyes were wide with shock and he’d dropped his dagger, trembling in his boots. I didn’t feel any grievance toward him. Nor did I offer him any resistance.
He’d told the world that I was an antichrist, but it was he and those who would come after him who were the antichrist. It was the energy of all who clung to judgment in opposition to love that was the antichrist.
I was the 49th Mystic, and I had found all five seals. Love was the only power that could undo fear, and I was that love. Inchristi was the light of love. Against the Fifth Seal there was no defense.
You don’t sweep a shadow from a room; you simply turn on the light.
“Go,” I whispered to Vlad.
His body trembled and then vanished into a swirl of shadowy fog. He was gone, leaving his black slacks and white jacket crumpled over a pair of cowboy boots. None of it mattered to me anymore. I was still swimming in a lake deep within me, flowing in a love unaffected by shadows.
I stepped up to the microphone that had fallen, picked it up, and walked toward the front of the stage.
It was time to tell them what was really happening. They would now learn that they were all the 49th Mystic on a journey from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, just like me.
Seeing is being in love. I was now seeing and being in love. I was witnessing.
It was time to do what I had come to do.